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In Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater, a nerdy and melancholy eighteen year old, is recruited to join a magic university in upstate New York called Brakebills. Quentin is obsessed with a children’s fantasy series about a magical land called Fillory, and real life just cannot compare, particularly when he sees himself as both sidekick and jilted suitor in his trio of friends. When invited to study at Brakebills, he hopes he has finally found his meaning in life, his place of belonging, and the thing that will finally bring him happiness.

Grossman riffs off the Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia traditions, and presents a rather more sardonic view of magic. As an older student, Eliot, tells Quentin, most people can’t do magic because “it’s very hard, and they’re not obsessive and miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to do it right.” Indeed, unlike Hogwarts which felt wondrous and, well, magical, Brakebills makes magic feel like a particularly rigorous college major, like pre-law or pre-med. During one term for example, students had to study in isolation all the different ways circumstances can change the makeup of a single spell. As Quentin observed, he knew more about that particular spell than he’d ever wanted to know, including how to cast it if he were a woman.

The book continues to follow the characters after graduation, when they struggle to find their place in a world where most people are unaware that magic exists. One of them discovers a portal to Fillory, and, having not quite found the happiness he sought in Brakebills, Quentin turns his attention into possibly finding happiness in the fantasy land of his youth. However, just like Brakebills isn’t quite as wondrous as Hogwarts, nor is Fillory anywhere near as magical as Narnia. The residents in Fillory appear to be in need of something, and while Quentin and his friends decide to go on a quest to become kings and queens of Fillory, the decision resulted more from an understanding of fantasy tropes and classic quest stories than from any real understanding of how the quest’s success will solve Fillory’s troubles.

I liked the story. I hesitate to call it more realistic than traditional magical stories because I like to think real-life magic would still be more exciting and wondrous than Grossman presents. As well, Grossman pulls short of delving deep into realism — while his characters drink a lot and face ennui upon graduation, they also lead charmed lives, with a magical network of corporations guaranteeing magical graduates a comfortable lifetime income for shell corporate jobs. I also hesitate to call it more adult than traditional magical stories, because while there is sex and drugs and certainly less wide-eyed innocence, there is also a naivete about Quentin and his friends’ approach to life, a sort of languorous privileged view that still makes me want to tell some of them to grow up. Still, in a way, both descriptors are accurate. Grossman does raise some interesting complications that could occur if magic and magical lands did exist. I can imagine mastery at magic requiring a lot more tedious memorization than fun tricks, and I can also imagine a magical fantasy land not quite living up to childhood expectations.

Among the characters, I absolutely loved Quentin’s classmates Eliot, a fashionable gourmet, and Alice, a brilliant, talented magician. In contrast, Quentin is not at all a likeable character, at least for me. It’s hard to root for someone who is so consumed by his own ennui and lack of self-worth that he is unable to see that other people around him have problems of their own and that he externalizes blame for his mistakes onto “the sick, empty world they were all in together.” (p. 263)

His attitude towards their quest in Fillory annoys me as well. When Alice points out that people could get hurt, he responds:

“If I die doing this, at least I’ll have done something. Maybe you’ll do something one of these days instead of being such a pathetic little mouse all the time.” (p. 332)

The problem is that they don’t really have a goal or stated need for that quest in the first place. Quentin is just bored with life and decides to find meaning by visiting Fillory, and then literally for lack of anything else to do, decides to go on a quest to become king.

Possibly one of the reasons I love Alice so much is that she calls Quentin out on his behaviour:

“If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or your going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”

“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want? Do you want to be the asshole who went to Fillory and was miserable there? Even in Fillory? Because that’s who you are right now.” (p. 333)

The end of the book promises further adventure in the sequel, this time involving Quentin’s childhood friend Julia, who was not accepted into Brakebills and therefore taught herself magic. From what I hear, she is a much more interesting character than Quentin, and the TV show version somewhat conflates both books so that, on the screen, we get her story alongside Quentin’s.

The Magicians TV Adaptation on Showcase

Having read the book, I’m much more excited to see how it translates on the screen, and to see the actors who will bring the characters to life. I also can’t wait to find out more about Julia’s story, as the glimpse I’ve seen of her in the book seems intriguing.

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Sometimes, you just want to completely immerse yourself in a good book. Such is the case with Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings. A doorstop at over 600 pages, the book was so good that I still wanted to read more after I finished. The story is so captivating that I lugged the book around on the subway to work every day, and devoured the entire tale in only about two weeks.

Liu is a master at world building. He has created a nation united under a single emperor, yet still feeling the tensions beneath its origins as seven separate kingdoms and the bloodiness of the emperor’s path to power. Enter our two heroes: wily bandit Kuni Garu and fierce warrior Mata Zyndu. Mata also happens to be the latest generation of a long family line whose power was deposed by the current regime. Kuni is on the path to power, yet his power lies in his background as a bandit, and his being, at heart, a commoner. Enter as well the gods, several of whom have a stake in the future of this nation, and like the gods in any ancient legend, have no qualms about interfering in human affairs.

Kuni and Mata become fast friends as they wage war against the cruel despot. They are united by a common goal, yet as time passes and circumstances change, both are revealed to have vastly different philosophies about the meaning of justice and how the world should be run.

I absolutely fell in love with this story, and I’m thrilled to see so much influence from Chinese folklore and mythology. So often, when I read these great epic novels — Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones — the influence is very clearly Western, and the characters usually come off as such. This is the first contemporary novel from a traditional publisher, that I’ve read (or at least can remember) with such scope and depth and such an epic, mythological, legendary feel, that struck me as being influenced by Eastern folklore. As an Asian Canadian, this is definitely important to me. (Another title of note, with a clear influence from Eastern mythology, is Amy McCulloch’s The Oathbreaker’s Shadow, a fantasy adventure YA duology.)

The Grace of Kings is the first book in the Dandelion Dynasty series. It is an entertaining story of intrigue, battles and political plotting. Beyond that, it also raises some interesting philosophical questions about what justice really means and how best to rule such a fragile nation. Above all, it’s a book to lose yourself in, so definitely set aside some time to treat yourself to this tale.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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“There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay.” So goes the blurb behind the advance reading copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. It’s a beautiful book, the stylized tree on the cover combined with the text on the back conveying a world of magic within its pages.

And indeed, Ishiguro invites us into an Arthurian style world, where a mist causes forgetfulness, and an elderly couple sets out on a quest to find their son. The language evokes a world of myth, the childlike Middle Earth in Tolkien’s The Hobbit rather than in his later trilogy. The themes are universal — love and forgiveness and the power of memory.

In Giant, amongst the encounters with knights and battles with dragons, amid the backdrop of political turmoil in England, the heart of the story lies in the love between the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice. A fog of forgetfulness has hidden memories of their past together, and at several points the question is raised whether some memories are best left forgotten. This is a particularly poignant question in light of the setting of the story — right at the crux of change, the death knell of the Arthurian age and the beginning of modern Britain. How much of Axl and Beatrice’s Britain will survive in memory, and given the various armed conflicts in their Britain’s history, how much would we ultimately want to remember?

As with any quest, there is a particular point of no return, the crux as it were of the entire adventure. For Axl and Beatrice, this takes the form of a legend about a boatman. According to the legend, couples who truly love each other may be ferried across to an island where they would be together forever. Yet before the trip, the couple must pass a test to prove the depth of their love, and if they fail, they are doomed to wander the island alone for all eternity. It’s a beautiful metaphor for death, and recalls the romantic ideal of love so strong that it lasts beyond death.

There are a lot of beautiful moments in Giant, and the conversations between Axl and Beatrice at times brought me to tears. But something was missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it, and it’s possible that my expectations were just too high (it’s an Ishiguro, after all). But I was expecting to be transported. And with such a mystical framework for the narrative, with such lyrical language and mythological encounters, I was expecting to lose myself in the world that the author has created. Yet I wasn’t. The story felt just a tad too crafted, the language just a tad too designed that it never quite clicked into a natural cadence. I appreciated what the author was trying to do, and I liked his characters and his themes, but I never quite fully connected to the story. This is a shame, because I love Ishiguro’s work, and I really wanted to lose myself in this book. It wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much more.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.